Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Brookhaven

Finding an Army Medal in a Small-Town Antique Store

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I’m always suspicious of Facebook messages coming from people I don’t know. If it seems that a message might possibly be legitimate, I’ll check the person’s profile page. More often than not, it’s people from Hong Kong or the Philippines or Africa, or people who names and profile photos clearly don’t match. Click delete.

A few weeks ago, one arrived that raised my suspicions, but the sender seemed legitimate. And he was. He asked me if I was the author of this article at Emerging Civil War: “Research for a Novel Upended a Family Legend.” Yep, that was me.

He said he had an interesting story to tell me, and we eventually connected by phone. 

Cross of Military Service

Some weeks before, he’d been in an antique store in Paris, Texas, north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He collects Civil War memorabilia, and he’d found a medal with a serial number on the back.

The medal was a Cross of Military Service. It had been awarded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDAC) to veterans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War and who themselves were veterans of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and/or the Global War on Terror. He said finding a medal like this was highly unusual, because families tended to hold on to them, even after the awardee’s death. 

He contacted the UDAC and learned that this one was even more unusual – it had been awarded to a woman for her service in both World War II and Korea. Her name was U.S. Army Major Ruby Edwina McCain. She was born in 1913 and died in 1991. The UDAC was able to tell him that her Civil War ancestor was Jarvis Seale, born in 1824 in Amite County, Mississippi, and died in 1862 at the Battle of Shiloh. Ruby was his great-granddaughter.

The man who found the medal went looking for Jarvis Seale, and what did he find but my article at Emerging Civil War.

Ruby Edwina McCain

For a long time, Jarvis Seale was the mystery man in the Young family Bible records. No one knew why he was there. Family Search eventually revealed the reason – he had married a Martha Young, the oldest sister of my great-grandfather Samuel, who originally bought the Bible and entered all of the family records. Samuel would have known his brother-in-law and remembered him in the Bible. Samuel also lost his two older brothers in the war.

What puzzled my new friend was what had puzzled several people – why was Jarvis listed in Find-a-Grave and Family Search as buried in a cemetery in Clarksville, Texas? The fact is, he wasn’t. He was buried in one of several mass graves for Confederate dead at Shiloh. At some point years later, one of his daughters moved with her husband to Clarksville, and she had placed a memorial stone there in the family plot. That was two mysteries solved – the Bible’s mystery name and the Texas gravestone.

Ruby McCain was from Clarksville. Her grandmother had been the one to arrange for the memorial stone. Clarksville is about 20 miles south of the Oklahoma border, and 30 miles east of Paris, Texas, where Ruby’s medal ended up. Our best guess is that a relative (Ruby had no children) had included the medal in an estate sale or given it away, and it ended up in the antique store.

Jarvis and Martha furnished their names for characters in my novel Brookhaven. A medal, a memorial stone, and a book brought them back from the past, facilitated by Facebook messenger and a phone call.

“Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War” by Sarah Kay Bierle

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In my research for my novel Brookhaven, it was difficult not to run across references to one particular officer.

John Pelham was an Alabama boy, the third of three sons and born in 1838 in a small wooden house in rural Benton County. His father was a doctor and farmer, enjoying both community respect and economic success. The family’s reputation was such that John’s father was able to get an appointment for his son to the U.S. Military Academy. The young man arrived at West Point in 1856, enrolling in a five-year degree program.

As the rhetoric of the years leading up to the Civil War became increasingly heated, West Point must have become a strange place – outwardly uniform but inwardly affected by the same passions rearing the country apart. John left the academy in 1861, one month shy of graduation. Like other Southerners at West Point, he was being closely watched as secession tore the country apart. He made his way to New York City and then to border-state Kentucky, finally reaching home. Just as he’d been watched by his commanding officers at West Point, he’d also been observed by their Southern counterparts, who were keen to make use of his military training.

For the rest of his short life – he would be mortally wounded aged 24 at the Battle of Kelly’s Ford in 1863 – John Pelham became the stuff of legend. Historian Sarah Kay Bierle has spent years studying in his life, separating fact from myth. The facts of his military prowess didn’t need myth and legend to enhance his reputation. Despite almost all of his letters having disappeared, she’s been able to reconstruct his life and accomplishments from the letters and reports of others as well as official records and reports.

Bierle has succinctly and compellingly summarized it all in Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War.

And what an enthralling story it is.

Pelham proved the utility of the horse artillery. Have horses pull artillery pieces meant they could be moved frequently and strategically during battle. Pelham demonstrated the value – and his own – during the battles of the Peninsular Campaign, First and Second Manassas (Bull Run), Antietam, and Fredericksburg, among several others. He caught the eye of Confederate generals like Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and Robert E. Lee. He was promoted to major and then recommended for a promotion to lieutenant colonel, which was pending at the time of his death. 

He became known as the “Gallant John Pelham;” it was Lee who described his “glorious courage” (and inspired the title of Bierle’s book). In the years after the war, the legends cropped up around him; it seems every young Southern woman had had a romance with him. (And while it was in a different context, it was Pelham who inspired one aspect of the main character in my novel – how legends get born that often have no basis in fact.)

Sarah Kay Bierle

Bierle is what’s called a public historian, working in the field of Civil War education and battlefield preservation. She’s written articles and essays for numerous publications, including Emerging Civil War, and is a frequent speaker on Civil War topics. Her previous publications include Decisions at Chancellorsville, War in the Western Theater, and Call Out the Cadets: The Battle of New Market, May 15, 1864. 

Glorious Courage is a fascinating read. It does what good history should do – separate fact from fable and present a person or event as it should be. In the case of John Pelham, he didn’t need legends to enhance his reputation, and Bierle serves her subject very well indeed.

Related:

Martha Pelham’s Letter: Finding Colorful Details for John Pelham’s 1858 Summer – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

Artillery: John Pelham –  Artilleryman, Gallant Fool, Splendid Boy – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

Podcast: Historian Sarah Kay Bierle on ‘Gallant’ John Pelham – John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

Top photograph: One of there three known photo of John Pelham.

What Happened to the Fireside Poets?

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When I first envisioned my novel Brookhaven, I focused on a family story passed down through generations, which turned out to be a legend, as in, almost entirely untrue. But two things shifted my focus. 

First, in 2022, I had the old family Bible conserved. It had seen better days; my father gave it to me wrapped in grocery store bag paper and tied with strong. My contribution had been to remove the paper and string, wrap it in acid-free paper, and store in an acid-free box. It sat on a closet shelf for years, until I brought it to a book conservator in St. Louis. He discovered something tucked in the Book of Isaiah that both my father and I had missed – a yellowed envelope containing a lock of auburn hair.

For various reasons, I believe the hair belonged to my great-grandmother Octavia. She died in 1888 at age 44. Unusual for the time, my great-grandfather Samuel never remarried. He died in 1920. And I thought to myself, “There’s a love story here.”

Second, also in 2022, we saw a movie entitled “I Heard the Bells.” It’s a snapshot of the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) during the Civil War, including both the tragic death of his beloved wife and the near death from a war wound of his oldest son Charles. Both events contributed to Longfellow’s writing the poem that became a Christmas hymn, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” 

To continue reading, please see me post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

“Fred Grant at Vicksburg” by Albert Nofi

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When I wrote my historical novel Brookhaven, I was aware of this story, but I didn’t know it in terms of the color and details. Now I do.

In the spring of 1863, Frederick Dent Grant was 12 going on 13. He’d been born in St. Louis. His mother was Julia Dent Grant, daughter of a slaveowner in St. Louis County. His father was Ulysses S. Grant, general in the Union Army, who was now encamped down the Mississippi River, charged with taking Vicksburg, the last Confederate fortification not in Union hands along the Mississippi. Memphis, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge were all in Union hands; Vicksburg was the last impediment to Union control of the river.

The teenaged Fred Grant

And then Grant did something that would seem almost inexplicable to parents today. In early March of 1863, he sent for his oldest son Fred to join him for the Vicksburg campaign. Fred’s mother also did something inexplicable – she let him go, although she did keep nine-year-old Ulysses Jr. with her and the family.

Fred Grant was one thrilled boy. He would talk about it, and give speeches on it, for the rest of his life.

Far from being watched, monitored, or babysat by an orderly, Fred had almost free roam the camps and even many of the battles. His father would occasionally try to keep him in a safe place, but Fred usually found a way to experience the excitement. His was with the army for numerous battles around Vicksburg, traveled with the army for the Battle of Jackson, and was there when Vicksburg surrendered. He also came down with a common soldier’s ailment – dysentery – and was eventually sent home to St. Louis to recuperate.

Many of Fred’s speeches still exist, and he wrote down his account of the experience in memoir form. Historian Albert Nofi had assembled many of these sources and edited Fred Grant at Vicksburg: A Boy’s Memoir at His Father’s Side During the American Civil War. Fred’s account in not a series of diary entries but rather the adult son of the Union general looking back on one of the most important engagements of the Civil War. While the Battle of Gettysburg usually gets more attention, the fall of Vicksburg established full Union control of the Mississippi River and split the Confederacy in two. 

Fred Grant about 1900

Fred Grant is more than an edited and annotated memoir, however. Nofi provides a succinct and informative introduction and includes several helpful appendices. These are a summary of the Grant and Dent families’ history, short biographies of people and explanations of places mentioned in the text, the order of battle, military terminology, and several other helpful sections that help provide context. The book is also profusely illustrated with photographs, including one of the young Fred Grant at about the time of Vicksburg.

Nofi received his Ph.D. in military history from the City University of New York. He’s written more than 40 books on military history and is a founding member and director of the New York Military Affairs Symposium. He lives in New York City. 

Fred Grant is a memoir, yes, but it also provides a window of a boy’s perspective of war, his father who happened to be one of the most important figures of the Civil War, and how we remember the formative events of our lives. I’s a thoroughly enjoyable book.

“The Southern Tradition at Bay” by Richard Weaver

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It’s something of an obvious truism to say that “winners write history.” That’s my starting point for considering The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought by Richard Weaver.

First published in 1968, the work was republished in 1989, and then again in the past year. It is a thoughtful examination, or re-examination, of the mind of the South after the Civil War and how Southerners interpreted their defeat. Weaver isn’t about defending the “Lost Cause” as much as is he focused on what was in the mind of the South before the war, what was driving those thoughts, how it developed during the war and after.

If you read the vast majority of histories and commentaries on the Civil War and its causes (and I read more than my fair share during the research for my novel Brookhaven), the vast majority will tell you that the cause, THE cause, was slavery. That determination, however, ignores considerable evidence. Even most northerners believed that the war was about preserving the Union, not to eradicate slavery. Slavery certainly moved more into the driver’s seat with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.

Henry Grady, who coined “The New South”

Weaver takes a different approach. He spent considerable time and effort examining memoirs, letters, journals, and other “first-hand” materials and concluded that what drove secession and war for the South, and in reverse for the North, was the clash of what was essentially a feudal society motivated by a romantic idealism and the egalitarian, more mechanized ideas born during the French Revolution and eventually finding their way into industrialization. Notions of chivalry were no match for the industrial juggernaut the Northern states were becoming. 

These ideas are not merely historical; they still are playing themselves out in culture, politics, and even religion. Consider the writings of Wendell Berry about localism, community, and agriculture, and the research writer Paul Kingsnorth has been doing on what he calls “the machine.” We’re still grappling with many of the same ideas that Weaver saw as bringing on the Civil War and what followed. After the war, Southerners, he says, were outraged at being called traitors; they saw the North as having betrayed the constitution and its principles. This belief seasoned their defenses, eventually leading to the “Lost Cause” idea. 

He considers the background or heritage of the war, what the apologists said, what both Southern and Northern soldiers themselves said in letters and memoirs, the fiction that came from the war, what notable figures like Henry Grady (the Atlanta publisher who coined the phrase “the New South”) said and defended, and the writings of the critics of the Southern feudal tradition. 

Rochard Weaver

His conclusion: “The South possesses an inheritance which it has imperfectly understood and little used. It is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness. I am conscious that this reverses the common judgment; but it may yet appear that the North, by its ready embrace of science and rationalism, impoverished itself, and that the South by clinging more or less unashamedly to the primitive way of life prepared itself for the longer run.”

Weaver (1910-1963) taught English at the University of Chicago, yet he was mostly known for his work on intellectual history, rhetoric, and politics. A native of North Carolina, he received his A.B. degree in English from the University of Kentucky and his M.A. degree from Vanderbilt University.  Before the University of Chicago, he taught at Auburn and Texas A&M universities and then returned to school to earn a Ph.D. degree from Louisiana State University. He was influenced by the so-called Agrarians, which included Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom. 

His thesis was titled “The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture.” It would eventually be published as this book, The Southern Tradition at Bay. Throughout his life, he was strongly associated with political and social conservatives. Having reading the work, it seems that Weaver thoughtfully, quietly, and comprehensively made his case.

Research Doesn’t Stop with Publication

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It was a year ago that the manuscript for my historical novel was attached to an email and sent to the publisher who requested it. I felt an incredible sense of relief. The thing was done. I could take a break from literally years of reading and research about the Civil War. Nine years of reading and research. 

I had started this even before I’d thought about writing a historical novel. I started reading about the Civil War because I was interested in it. It was only when I stumbled across an event called Grierson’s Raid, a Union cavalry raid in 1863 that the idea for a novel arose. The raid began at the border between Mississippi and Tennessee, swept down through the state, and eventually ended at Baton Rouge in Louisiana. It was designed as a diversion for Ulysses S Grant to quietly move his Union army across the Mississippi and attack Vicksburg from the east.

My ancestors had experienced that raid. They lived in the Brookhaven, Mississippi, area, one of sites that Grierson’s raiders had visited.

I researched everything I could about the raid and the broader war. Once I knew I would be writing a novel, my research intensified. By the time I sent the email to the publisher, I was close to exhausted, at least mentally.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.